- (Via Milinet)
Mercenaries: Why Not?
By Michael Kinsley
Tuesday , May 30, 2000 ; A19
This Memorial Day, like all of them for 35 years, our thoughts
about American
soldiers, and our debates about when and where their lives
should be put at
risk, were dominated by the contrast between World War II and
Vietnam. Almost
everyone at the time and ever since has agreed that World War II
was the good
war. Vietnam, at the time and ever since, was either an
immorally extended
mistake or a worthy cause betrayed (or dozens of variations on
these themes).
But another difference between World War II and Vietnam is
usually
overlooked, although it explains a lot. World War II involved
mobilization of
the entire society. Most young and not-so-young adult men served
in the
military or in some other way. Vietnam, by contrast, even at its
peak
required only a small fraction of a narrower draft-age cohort.
Although the
draft was supposed to be universal, four-fifths of draft-age
males did no
military service and nine-tenths never saw Vietnam. This mundane
statistical
reality explains much more than moral opposition or cowardice
does about why,
when Vietnam-age men pop up in the news, they usually seem to
have avoided
Vietnam.
The future occasions when Americans may be called upon to fight
and die are
sure to resemble Vietnam more than World War II: Their necessity
will be
debatable, and they will require the service of only a small
minority. That
makes World War II an almost useless model, politically. One
thing democracy
does best is mobilizing a whole society toward a transcendently
important
goal. One thing democracy does very badly, though, is allocating
unequal
sacrifice. When some are asked to fight and die while most get
to continue
the flow of their lives, war becomes the ultimate NIMBY
(not-in-my-back-yard)
problem.
Maybe it is no bad thing if military escapades become as
politically hopeless
as a nuclear power plant. But the essence of NIMBY is that
something cannot
happen politically even with majority support if it imposes an
unfair burden
on a few. Since Vietnam we have tried two solutions: the draft
lottery and
the all-volunteer military. But a lottery is just a way to
allocate
unfairness, not eliminate it. Meanwhile, during recent military
actions, the
press has turned even active-duty members of the all-volunteer
military into
your standard interest group being unfairly imposed upon. And
judging from
those recruiting commercials, America's soldiers are justified
in feeling
that they volunteered for computer training, not to risk their
lives in some
miserable far-away desert or jungle.
Every political system, even democracy, is about forcing people
to do things
they don't want to do. This is justifiable when you need a
social consensus.
We must decide communally how clean the air should be, but we
don't need to ta
ke a vote on what flavor of ice cream we prefer. On ice cream,
we can each
have our own way. That's even better than democracy. War would
seem to be the
classic communal issue, and most aspects of it--Is it worth
engaging the
national honor? Or killing lots of foreigners?--need to be
settled
democratically. But why can't the most painful issues--whether
American lives
should be put at risk, and if so whose--be settled on the ice
cream model?
Why can't people decide for themselves?
Take the main should-we-or-shouldn't-we issue of these years:
humanitarian
interventions. ("Humanitarian" is now a pejorative term for
situations with
no, or no self-sufficient, national-security issue at stake.) Is
Bosnia or
Kosovo or Sierra Leone worth some American's blood? There would
be no need
for a social consensus about this if every individual soldier
were truly
acting voluntarily. Suppose there was a volunteer corps
explicitly devoted to
"humanitarian" interventions. Suppose its members could even
pick and choose:
Rwanda, yes; Croatia, no . . . or, for more money, anywhere you
want, boss. A
president wishing to use this corps would have to entice or
persuade enough
members or give up.
Would these soldiers be "mercenaries"? If so, so what? We
positively
celebrate mercenary motives these days in most areas of life.
During Vietnam,
the columnist Nicholas von Hoffman coined a brilliant eight-word
critique:
"Draft old men's money, not young men's bodies." In other words,
why should
shooting and getting shot at, of all professional activities, be
expected to
sell at a discount? But actually, the motives of these people
are likely to
be less mercenary than those of current military volunteers
(based on the
mercenary themes used to recruit them). Individual motives will
differ. Some
will be high-minded idealists. Many, no doubt, will be
low-minded
thrill-seekers. Once again, so what?
And is it immoral to pay someone to fight and maybe die for a
cause that is
not vital to the national interest? For a war not "good" enough,
or big enough
, for a national draft? Cruise the Web looking for death.
Farming killed 210
people over a recent five-year period, just in Pennsylvania.
According to
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an American male's lifetime risk
of death by
homicide is about equal to an American soldier's odds of getting
killed
during Vietnam. Many jobs are dangerous, and life is a tragedy
waiting to
happen. If idealism or machismo or money tempts someone into a
dangerous life
serving his country's values, if not its interests narrowly
defined, his is
probably a life well spent.
Michael Kinsley, editor of Slate (www.slate.com), writes a
weekly column for
The Post.
© 2000 The Washington Post Company
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